Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

What I’ve Learned About Record Cleaning

Robert gets right to the point here:

I’d say that the biggest misconception that I held about record cleaning previously was that it would not improve the bass. My thinking was that better cleaning would reveal more at the top end and upper midrange, but whatever bass was cut into the grooves was either there or it wasn’t, and cleaning those grooves better wasn’t going to bring it out.

This turned out to be completely wrong. Better cleaning makes it easier for our system to reveal what’s on our records, and this helps us hear more of what sits at the very back of the soundstage. These elements of the recording that reside further from our ears rely on an appropriate amount of bass to give them their correct size and weight. So when a record has more bass, it often has a bigger soundstage, and the performers will tend to sound more fleshed-out and have greater presence.

Robert gets his table and arm dialed in, then realizes:

I thought for a long while that the multi-step cleaning method I had developed using Walker Audio fluids was getting my records as clean as Better Records gets theirs. I had bought or borrowed quite a few Nearly White Hot and White Hot Stampers over the years, and then found and cleaned similar copies that, in several cases, equaled or even bettered the Hot Stampers. Or at least I thought they had.

With a new cartridge installed, Robert has an unexpected insight:

Finally I’d reached the full potential of my front end, and what was my reward? I could now hear that the records I’d cleaned with my method did not in fact sound as good as the ones the folks at Better Records had cleaned. I was forced to determine that the Hot Stampers had a level of transparency, top to bottom end extension and overall integration and cohesiveness that my other records lacked.

The differences Robert hears are not a mystery. They are the result of the way Robert cleans records and the number of copies he goes through to find “the one.”

Part of what makes our records sound better than the copies others own with the exact same stampers — when they do sound better, something that may not always be the case — is that even with the right machines and fluids and our step by step instructions, there is more to it than that.

There are some approaches to record cleaning that we use which we have never revealed to the public. We need our records to be a cut above, and the cleaning secrets we keep to ourselves make that not just a possibility, but a near certainty.

Robert points out that he had to do a lot of work to get to the point where this reality became impossible to ignore. He asks how many other audiophiles have worked so hard and advanced so far so that they too would be able to tell that this gap was real, that the difference between their best copy of a record and the one we sold them would be not just audible but significant.

Not many is our answer, and it’s partly because of some other facts of record production, the kind that we go to great pains on this blog to support with scientific evidence. We may not know why records sound so different, but we are in a very good position to know that they most certainly do.

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